Alamo Bowl: Iowa 27, Texas Tech 0

Hawkeyes Cut Down Tech's Hanspard

SAN ANTONIO — All week long, Iowa players and coaches were asked about the great Byron Hanspard of Texas Tech.

The popular inquiry: How do you stop him?

Iowa showed how Sunday at the Alamo Bowl, as the Hawkeyes limited the Doak Walker Award recipient to 64 yards on 18 carries and crunched Texas Tech 27-0 to improve the Big Ten's record to 2-0 in bowl games.

Hanspard and his coach, Spike Dykes, couldn't agree on how the Hawkeyes shut him down.

"They took away his cutting lanes," Dykes said.

"That's not true," Hanspard insisted. "They took away the corner; that made me cut back."

The reason was insignificant. The result was not.

"Keeping a great runner like Hanspard from scoring is one of the highlights of my career," said Iowa coach Hayden Fry, who has been a head coach since 1972. "I hope I don't wake up in the morning and find out it's a dream."

The game was hyped as a battle between top-flight tailbacks, but few would have expected Iowa's Sedrick Shaw, who finished with 113 yards on 20 carries, to come out on top and win the game's offensive MVP award.

That honor was expected to go to Hanspard, who was playing before an overwhelmingly pro-Texas Tech crowd of 55,677 at the Alamodome in perhaps his final performance as a Red Raider.

Hanspard, a junior who rushed for 2,084 yards before Sunday, will announce Monday morning whether he will declare himself eligible for the NFL draft.

Asked his gut feeling, Dykes responded, "My gut feeling was that we'd play a good game (Sunday night), so I don't know how much you can trust me."

Dykes' team, which finished 7-5, was rustier than a 10-year-old nail.

Although they were unranked and facing the No. 21 Hawkeyes, the Red Raiders were four-point favorites. But they didn't play like it. On third- and fourth-down plays, they converted just two of 17 attempts.

"My job is to get the players ready and they didn't have the spark," Dykes said. "There's nobody to blame but me."

No, Spike, some blame should go to Texas Tech's defenders, who looked silly trying to tackle Shaw on two game-turning runs.

Three minutes into the contest, Shaw took a handoff and found himself face-to-face with a handful of white Red Raider jerseys. Shaw danced around, shaking tackles, before sprinting around the left side for a 24-yard gain to the Texas Tech 2. Two plays later, Matt Sherman took in a quarterback sneak to put Iowa ahead 6-0.

In the second quarter, Shaw peeled off a beautiful 20-yard touchdown run, spinning through Red Raiders defenders like a dreidel. The Hawkeyes' two-point conversion put them ahead 14-0.

Iowa, which finished 9-3, played with all-black helmets to show support for teammate Mark Mitchell, whose mother, Diane, was killed in an automobile accident Saturday while driving to San Antonio for the game.

Mitchell, who flew back to Iowa City, spoke to Fry before the game. Fry passed on Mitchell's words to the team.

Said Fry: "The last thing Mark said to me was: `I won't ask you to win the game for me or my mom. I know the Hawks will play hard.' You can't be more humble than that. That fired the team up more than anything."